Giving Compass' Take:

• Mareesa Nicosia reports that fiber-optic internet in Laaska is opening up new learning opportunities for students. 

• How can funders work to spread faster internet to remote areas with the greatest need? 

• Learn about the promise of public broadband. 

Before they got down to business for the day, students in Devin Tatro’s social studies class were offered a quiet moment of self-reflection: On this golden fall afternoon at Nome-Beltz Junior/Senior High School, were they feeling chipper, distressed or somewhere in between?

About 20 students gazed at their laptops, an online poll open on each screen. One by one, they selected the picture of the facial expression that best matched their mood, and with a swift click, sent an answer to the teacher. She scanned the responses flooding her screen and made a few mental notes. Then, without missing a beat, she switched the smartboard display and launched into a multiple-choice quiz using a game-based online learning platform called Kahoot!

The IT staff at Nome Public Schools would have strongly discouraged this kind of lesson just two years ago, lest it strain the bandwidth shared by the district’s 720 students and 100 staff members. At that time, a YouTube video took two minutes to buffer. And forget a long-distance video call, one of the few ways kids in this remote district not far from the Arctic Circle can interact with students outside their own school building. That would have brought everything—email, online testing, cloud-based records systems and student research—to a halt.

But the future of educational technology here is starting to emerge from a pixelated past. Nome and two other school districts in northwestern Alaska are pioneering a high-speed fiber-optic cable connection that has the potential to transform how education is delivered in the state—and shrink a connectivity gap between rural Alaska and the majority of American schools. The great irony is that the multimillion-dollar cable was planted in the Arctic by an Anchorage-based telecommunications company thanks, in large part, to global warming.

But last year when the district switched to the fiber connection, which is cheaper, it got a 25 percent increase in bandwidth for about 20 percent of the previous cost, according to Phillips.

Read the full article about fiber-optic internet in Alaska by Mareesa Nicosia at The Hechinger Report.